Thursday, December 12, 2013

3D Sculpting Software - Curvy 3D

I'm trying to find a 3D modeling software that is relatively easy for a beginner to navigate. 

Everyone knows how much I love TinkerCAD but for a lot of what I want to do, it can't create organic shapes. You can only do so much creating .svgs in Illustrator and importing into TinkerCAD. I can't chamfer or bevel, I can't create fillets. 

I can use Autodesk's Inventor or AutoCAD but I really want to work organically. My other thought was to sculpt everything by hand and use the Sense 3D scanner to create models, but really, I should learn how to model digitally. 

I don't have the education that Justin has (and that is why he has an INTENSE understanding of models) and don't necessarily need to. But I need to be able to create organic designs digitally. I need to be able to do more than extrude an .svg file and print that (really, I could just be using a laser cutter, which is much faster and I could work in a variety of materials for that). 

To truly take advantage of what we are building, I need to model. 

I'm trying a bunch of programs out, either freeware or on trial basis, in the next few weeks to see how I feel about them and try to judge their ease of use. I want to find a program that a novice could play around with and not be frustrated. 

Enter Curvy3D. I'm going to play with it for at least a week. I started playing around with it today, but got a request to help make a Rufio costume by tomorrow. So I took the opportunity to carve some dragon's teeth for a necklace, make a mold and create custom beads for it. We also do some low tech manufacturing here was well. It's not always lasers and PLA :)

Clay "dragon tooth" (left) and inverse mold (right)
The beads are in the oven and will be assembled in the morning. 

Just in case you don't remember Rufio, here's a photo


I didn't really get far enough into Curvy3D start getting into the nitty gritty, but it allows me to start doing what I had planned for in my designs. There is a 30 day free trial (that's how I'm checking it out) and the normal cost is $99.00. It is currently discounted 25% for a sale price of $74.25. That's not bad considering the intense investment most other software entails. 

I plan do to some screen captures and possibly some videos while I'm playing around with it, which I will share here. Some others I am checking out will be Wings3D, Sculptris and Modo. 123D Sculpt (autodesk product) is, unfortunately, iPad only. So that's not going to be in the running.

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